Many drugs make it through preclinical research with potential and promise. But in clinical trials, drugs, especially cancer therapies, often fail. That may be because cancer models are inadequate and do not reliably replicate the tumor environment.
Neuroscientist Ronit Satchi-Fainaro and her team at the University of Tel Aviv have created a 3-D-printable bioink that mimics the brain tumor microenvironment. The new model may one day replace cell culture and animal models for drug discovery, screening, and development.
“They developed a realistic model that contains tumor environmental cells and a functioning vascular network in addition to tumor cells… and showed that the model is more similar to real tumors than 2-D cell line models,” said Shai Rosenberg, a neuro-oncologist at Hadassah Medical Center, who was not involved in the new work.
Many drugs show promise in the lab, but approximately 90 percent of drugs fail clinical trials. “We wanted to ...
